Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
Once doubt begins it spreads rapidly.
The Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.
If you owe your banker a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe your banker a million pounds, he is at your mercy.
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.
Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
Economists must leave to Adam Smith alone the glory of the Quarto, must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis, and achieve immortality by accident, if at all.
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the wickedest of men will do the most wicked things for the greatest good of everyone.
Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes a bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done.
Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.
Chess is a cure for headaches.
This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.
It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.
In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.
The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems – the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.
I do not know which makes a man more conservative – to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.